Rating of
2.5/4
it just isn’t as good as it should be
Looneymanthegreat - wrote on 04/12/13
Did you see drive? Wasn’t it awesome? I absolutely loved it. It was one of the most critically acclaimed movies of 2011, and for good reason it was awesome, and epicly so.
The Place beyond the Pines is sort of like a Drive remake and two spin-off movies squished into a 150 minute time slot.
The first half or so is very much like Drive (with a little blue valentine thrown in for good measure) without any of the style and a fraction of the substance. Of course there are a few differences, for example: our protagonist in “The Pines” is a stupefying good motorcycle rider instead of a stupefying good car driver, but I’ve seen remakes that had more differences from the original then this does from Drive. Holy cow the protagonist is even played by Ryan Gosling.
Then the movie turns into a story about the man who killed Gosling’s character. The story starts by having something to do with the Gosling story, but winds up being about corrupt cops and has almost nothing to do with the first half of the movie. Sure the cop is there, but who gives a flying flip? Gosling’s character, the protagonist, has died at this point; the movie should be ending at this juncture.
At the end the movie it kind of redeems itself by showing us the lives of the sons of the two main characters. We see Goslings characters son trying to find out more about his dead father and realizing that he is good friends with the son of the man who killed him. It’s the best part of the movie.
It’s actually hard to talk about this flick as if it was a cohesive hole, because it isn’t. This is a movie divided into three stories that while they happen to the same people in the same universe are very separate and don’t belong together. There are even bits of story within the three stories that are unnecessary, this movie felt a lot longer then it was, and was a lot longer then it needed to be. I applaud Director Cianfrance for trying to make something so ambitious, but it just isn’t as good as it should be.
I would recommend that anybody who liked Cianfrance’s other movies, Drive or Ryan Gosling check this one out. I’ve made it sound really bad in this review, but that’s really just the disappointment speaking, because I wanted this to be a masterpiece. It’s really pretty good, just don’t set your expectations too high.
